China’s southwest frontier drops three kilometres into valleys
Yunnan, an inland southwestern Chinese province of about 394,000 square kilometres and 47.2 million people (2020), centres on Kunming. Mountains dominate: northwest highs and southeast lows can differ by 3,000 metres between peaks and river trenches, so most residents cluster in the east.
The Yuanmou Man, a Homo erectus fossil found by railway engineers in the 1960s, is China’s oldest known hominid at about 1.7 million years. Neolithic villagers around Lake Dian used stone tools and built simple timber houses. Around the third century BC the Chu general Zhuang Qiao marched in from the upper Yangtze and made himself King of Dian, beginning a long influx of Chinese influence.
Parts of the province formed the Dian Kingdom in the third and second centuries BCE until Han conquest created Yizhou Commandery, and the turmoil of the Three Kingdoms period later weakened imperial control. From the Yuan dynasty onward, state-backed migration drew Han settlers from northern and south-eastern China into the frontier in successive waves.
The name first attached to Yunnan County, set up by the Han near today’s Xiangyun. In the Tang era Emperor Xuanzong named Piluoge, ruler of Nanzhao, King of Yunnan because Nanzhao began in that county, and as the kingdom grew, the name spread; the Yuan created Yunnan province after taking the Dali Kingdom. Han sources never explained the word. South of colourful clouds is the popular reading, backed by some Ming annals but dismissed by historian Tan Qixiang as superficial, and south of the Yun Range fails because that range name appears only in Tang writing. Other scholars suggest south of the cloudy Cang Mountain or a Loloish or Bai origin.
Terrain dominates everything here. The land falls from high mountains in the north-west to lower country in the south-east, peaks and river gorges can differ by 3,000 metres, and most people therefore live in the east.
Source: Yunnan
